Recommended

This is a short book on the cognitive nature of religious origins. Tremlin used paleoanthropology primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission to show that the cognitive process we’ve developed for other normal, everyday activities are the same ones that we use in the formation of religious ideas. This book is more focused on the cognitive aspect of religion rather than the anthropological aspect, as Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained is, though they both overlap a bit. This book was published in 2010. I saw Boyer’s book on the recommended list but not this one.

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